Places Caytastrophy Wants to Go

A collection of memorabilia from the Beat era in the back of a San Francisco bookstore.

A hidden subterranean installation offers a view of the sky.

A still functioning vaudeville carousel that has operated for over a century boasts a colorful menagerie and past.

A historic hotel that made a cameo in Hitchcock's classic film has no intention of letting guests forget its fame.

Golden Gate Park's historic collection of plants.

The oldest burial ground in the city, final resting place of city founders, Ohlone natives and murderers alike.

The remains of a ruined mansion memorialize the 1906 earthquake.

San Franciscans leave gifts and messages for the magical beings that live behind the tiny, mysterious door installed on a tree in Golden Gate Park.

This 19th-century church is now a popular roller rink.

San Francisco's urban bison herd has persisted in the face of extinction, development, and disease.

A 300-ship graveyard, with a few still visible at low tide.

Visible below the waves are memorials to the city's Gold Rush dead.

A modern mechanical planetary system, part of a 10,000 year clock.

The randomness of this wall of lava lamps helps encrypt up to 10 percent of the internet.

An essential stop before plundering, BYO Cutlass.

Staircase winds down the side of Telegraph Hill through gardens, wild parrots flying overhead.

A shop full of natural curiosities, carnivorous plants, and costumed taxidermied mice.

The seawater playground of gilded-era San Francisco burned to the ground in 1966.

A walk-in working camera obscura produces 360-degree live images of the San Francisco coast.

A favorite haunt of dinosaur loving children and hallucinogen loving hippies alike.

Its buzzing collection honors vibrator history.

A museum befitting the city responsible for supplying the majority of the world's LSD.

Carnivorous plants, medieval aphrodisiacs, and the largest original wood structure glass conservatory in the western hemisphere.

Relics of the 1894 Midwinter Exposition continue to delight visitors today.